Why We Say that IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) Is Therapeutic and Diagnostic…
What on earth are those ladies talking about? Have they lost their minds? How can treatment tell you more about what the problem is than the diagnostic tests themselves? Isn’t the treatment supposed to treat the problem, not tell you what’s wrong? Yes and no and everything in between. Hold your questions for a moment, because we have answers.
A good chunk of couples today suffer from unexplained infertility. While much of that infertility is thought to be related to egg quality, often times unexplained infertility dodges our current diagnostic capabilities (the tests in our arsenal). No matter what tests we perform on you and your partner, we find nothing. Blood work, physical exams, ultrasounds, sperm checks, and the tube test: they all come back normal. This can be beyond frustrating, for both you and us! We want to give you answers just as much as you want answers. Unfortunately, despite our endless years of schooling, training, and post-training, we can’t.
In many cases, we can’t tell you about your reason for infertility until you go through treatment (a.k.a. IVF) and we take a magnifying glass to your gametes and embryos.
Yes, ovarian reserve testing (FSH, AMH, AFC) tells us a whole lot. While these tests often help us diagnose the problem (diminished ovarian reserve-low egg quantity) and give us a good idea about how to treat the problem (and how much medication to treat it with), they don’t always tell the whole story. There are many women who have tons of follicles/eggs but have very poor egg quality. However, when their eggs come out and the resultant embryos don’t divide well, degenerate, and don’t make babies, we by the transitive property (woo-hoo, algebra) know a lot about the embryo quality. Furthermore, if such embryos make it to PGS (pre-implantation genetic screening = genetic testing for abnormal chromosome number), the abnormal-to-normal ratio can surprise us and provide even more answers to a previously unanswerable problem.
One of the most interesting parts of our job is to spend time in the IVF laboratory. Watching our skilled colleagues (embryologists) as they manipulate eggs, sperms, and embryos is fascinating. Through our time in their presence, we have learned a lot about infertility, fertility, and the grey in between. Eggs that degenerate, sperm that is abnormally shaped, and embryos that arrest, fragment, and break down provide us with a lot of answers (#diagnosis). If you get pregnant, then it is also treatment.
In many ways, we find answers in the smallest or tiniest members of our crew. It is for this reason that we say, nearly three times a day, that “IVF is both diagnostic and therapeutic.”
IVF is certainly not always the answer, for either diagnosis or treatment. It doesn’t always work and doesn’t always succeed in getting women pregnant. Even when the embryo quality is an A++++ in embryology labs that are not giving triple-A ratings just to get in good standings, IVF can fail over and over again.
We do not have tunnel vision, and we are not afraid to change directions or ask for directions. We want to do what’s best, and if that does not mean IVF or Western medicine or traditional treatments, we are open to trying new things. But just remember, when you hear “IVF” and think, “I will never do that,” and your doctor says, “IVF is not only diagnostic but also therapeutic,” that person has not lost his or her mind! The lab lets us in on a whole lot and in many cases leaves you pregnant!